How to Beat the Whiskey Shortage

Are you a casual fan of
distilled spirits that have been placed into a large barrel and
left to sit in a warehouse for years, possibly many of them, so
that over time, the wood transforms the harsh, clear liquid into
something that is sort of brown and tastes mellower and rounder and
deliciouser and expensiver? Are you therefore afraid of the
whiskey shortage that the major
whiskey companies are warning you will mean higher prices and
empty shelves and unchecked sobriety, so buy now, buy all you can,
before it’s all gone?

Drink rum instead. You can buy some old-ass rum, which, after
being distilled from molasses or sugar cane, has sat around in
barrels for long periods of time, for relatively small sums of
money: El Dorado 15 is, as you might expect, made with a blend of
rums that have sat in a barrel for at least fifteen years. Is it
slightly sweet and rounded with a “full nose packed with dark
coffee, candied orange, almonds, dark chocolate, pepper and rich
vanilla.” It is only thirty-six
dollars. Barbancourt 15 is kind of soft and woody and fruity
and other things you might say about a bourbon, but instead of corn
it’s like molasses. It’s about forty bucks. Ron Zacapa 23, which is
a blend of rums between six and twenty three years old, is probably
the first rum that made a lot of people go, “Oh, rum isn’t just
that stuff that goes in a daiquiri or a mojito or that made me
vomit pieces of my intestines into a urinal while I was wearing a
silver crown.” Here are some tasting notes for
it: “Nose full or apricots, citrus fruits, vanilla, cocoa and
bourbon.” It runs around forty to forty-five dollars. You could
also buy some older, more expensive rum, for the same reasons you
might buy an older, expensiver whiskey, to show have you have t a s
t e, like the Dictador 20 Year Old for sixty bucks, or El Dorado 21
Year Old for ninetyish dollars or a
rare twenty-five-year-old rum from English Harbour for four
hundred dollars.

(But, you say, whiskey—bourbon—is the most American of all
spirits. It’s America in a Solo cup. It’s what this country was
built on. This is incorrect. Our colonial working stiff
forefathers, the non-rich ones, they drank
rum—awful, rank, cheap rum. Whiskey didn’t really come around
in the colonies until after rum, so you could even say it’s kind of
a poseur?)

What should you do with this old-ass rum that has been sitting
around in a barrel for a while? A lot of the same things you would
do with a whiskey or other mature spirits: You can drink it neat or
with an ice cube or as an old fashioned (an old fashioned is just a
spirit, sugar, water, bitters and MAYBE a lemon peel, though you
might want to use demerara sugar?) or in like a Manhattanish thing
with sweet vermouth, probably Carpano Antica or Cocchi Vermouth di
Torino. Drink it and stop worrying about the whiskey shortage, or
that you won’t be displaying a sufficient level of sophistication
in your liquor choices because when literally everybody else is
talking about how much they loooove whiskey, you? You appreciate
fine aged rum.